ART-PRESENTATION: Christian Boltanski-Storage Memory, Part I

In his installations and mixed-media works, Christian Boltanski uses photographs and found objects to question memory and individuality. An awareness of mortality, and of the general tenuousness of human existence, haunts his work. According to the artist, while individual memories might prove to be fragile, they are still filled with truthful yet unique values, making it the reason why he has often been choosing daily items as main creative elements to construct an archive of humanity (Part II).

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Power Station of Art Archive

Through installations, videos, sounds and shadow theaters, the exhibition “Storage Memory” at Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai seek to inspire visitors’ emotional bonds on visual, aural, and psychological levels. The exhibition doesn’t only present older works but also his new project specially commissioned for the exhibition space adapted from its 165-meter-tall chimney. It is an exclusively immersive experience, as visitors are invited to personally join the artist’s special creative endeavor “Les Archives du Coeur” (2005-), by recording their own heartbeats. With individual memories always being transient throughout history, the artist’s attempt to archive human memory is therefore declaring a sense of paradoxical sadness, just as the clothes themselves represent both disappearance and absence of their long-expired owners. The Installation “Personnes” (2010) dominates the 1,200 m² space of PSA’s ground floor, including a mountain pile of garments weighing nearly 10 tons, over which a 15-meter-tall crane repeatedly and endlessly lifts up and lets go of the pieces of clothing. While such recycled human clothing is meant to symbolize our flesh, the crane above is an allegory to the hand of God as well as the ineluctable fist of fate. With noise from the machine repeatedly echoing throughout the whole exhibition space and the ground floor covered by scattered clothes, visitors are invited to special-planned avenues allowing them to dive into the memories of those deceased. In French, the word “Personnes” has dual meanings, referring to either “persons” or “nobody”. Here, the artist uses this double-edged word, which denotes presence but literally contains absence, to emphasize the inescapability of death and how chance watches over the destiny of each. Once defining himself as an “artist who shaped his practice during the time of Minimalism” and also “a sentimental” one, Boltanski has been fascinated with choosing daily items of simple forms and rich emotions as creative materials and endowing them with epic universal values. In 2005, out of fear for approaching death, the artist started to take the sound of heartbeats as his artistic medium. From an accidental attempt, he recorded his own heartbeats. Describing individual heartbeats as “little memory”, Boltanski said such memory is “what makes us unique, is extremely fragile, and it disappears with death”. Inspired by the strong symbolic ties between heartbeats and individual lives, he decided to start his collection of different heartbeats”. Since 2005, a project entitled “The Archives of Hearts” has being undertaken by the artist, who globally set a utopian goal, an ambition to collect heartbeats from all parts of the world. To date, his collection has grown to include heartbeats of nearly 120,000 people, all permanently preserved on Japan’s Teshima Island. With both “Coeur” (2018) and “Les Archives du Coeur” (2005- ), the exhibition seeks to present his heartbeats-based artistic endeavor in a comprehensive manner. After several field studies to examine the construction of the PSA, Boltanski personally chose to broadcast his own heartbeats in one of the museum’s unique and irregular exhibition spaces, the chimney. The recordings play along with a huge light bulb hanging high inside this enormous Industrial Age heritage, to glitter in sync with the acoustically amplified heartbeats. Meanwhile, a special workshop to gather heartbeats is set up on the 2nd floor of the PSA, where visitors can record and preserve their own heartbeats, or even send them to dear friends for interconnections of their life frequencies.

Info: Curator: Jean-Hubert Martin, Power Station of Art, 200 Huayuangang Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, Duration: 25/4-8/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.powerstationofart.com